Spectre Black

by J. Carson Black

  Like now. Earl caught his eye and grinned, as if he knew what Landry was thinking.

  Time went by. Nothing happened.

  The tension grew. It had weight. Landry thought perhaps he should just get it over with and kick Earl’s ass. There were a number of ways he could do it. A chokehold. He could kill him instantly, but he thought that would only put him in more hot water.

  Still, in war, you always took the advantage. And you went all the way if there was any doubt—

  He heard Earl stir. Pretending to be asleep, Landry let one eye open a slit. Earl was sitting up. It had been swift and quiet. He heard the soft rustle of the meth head’s jumpsuit rasp across the made-up cot. Heard the light stamp of his feet onto the floor: one, two.

  Landry closed his eyes.

  When Earl came for him, Landry was ready. He lay still on the bunk, but opened his right hand, stretching it as hard and straight as he could make it, fingers and thumb far apart. Landry slid off the bunk, and did his best to look confused and frightened. Let the guy advance until he was half a foot away. That was the moment Landry had been waiting for. He struck fast at the man’s trachea, snapped his hand out so quickly Earl didn’t know what happened. Landry made sure not to hit him too hard; he wasn’t about to kill the guy. Earl raised both hands to his throat, and that was when Landry followed up with the second blow. Hands cupped, he stepped into the guy and smacked both ears at once. Again, he didn’t put much force behind it, but clapping the man’s ears did the trick.

  It was over in seconds. Earl stumbled like a drunk stepping into a pothole and went down, his shiv hitting the floor with a clatter. Out cold.

  His eardrums broken.

  Landry walked over, raised him to a sitting position against the wall of the cell, and made sure his breathing passageway was clear. It was the least he could do.

  “Buck up,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”

  Doubtful the guy could hear him.

  Chapter 8

  Landry lay in his bunk, waiting patiently for the racket to recede. There had been quite a commotion: jailers yelling, Earl coming to and trying to stand up. His inner ears all shot to hell. He’d fallen down twice now. His panic started low in his throat before revving up into a loud but eerie siren. Landry didn’t dwell on Earl’s punctured eardrums.

  After Earl was carted away, Landry sat on his bunk and thought things through.

  Earl had a shiv. He had been bent on killing him. In fact, he seemed almost desperate to get the job done. Still, Landry thought it was a flat performance. Earl might have done an adequate job, if he were dealing with someone who didn’t know how to fight back, but he had been hopelessly overmatched.

  Someone wanted him dead, or at the very least, out of commission. And the easiest way to get to someone was inside a jail. It was an enclosed space. There was nowhere to run. And all you needed were for the guards to look the other way. You couldn’t beat the talent pool inside. There were all sorts of crooks in jail, many of them homicidal. Mental illness was the order of the day. There were people who would kill for a pack of cigarettes. There were people who were happy to maim and kill just for the hell of it, like Earl.

  But Earl had been . . . rusty, and so it had not worked. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t try again. Landry had been locked in a place where he couldn’t escape.

  So who would want him dead, or at least discouraged? He went through the list. At the top was whoever had taken Jolie. Next would be someone he’d rubbed the wrong way.

  He knew the perfect candidate: the FBI agent, Carla Vitelli. She and her fiancé, the corn-fed boy who had been dumb enough—or prescient enough—to threaten him.

  He blamed himself for a blatant lack of chivalry. He’d left the motel room while she slept—he’d been rude. He regretted that. There was a certain etiquette in sleeping with someone you didn’t know, and he should have stuck around.

  In his defense, he could not stand to spend one more minute in that room with her. She was obsessive. She reminded him of a horse soldier who ran his horse over broken ground for miles and miles, whipping him all the way. It was almost as if she wanted to kill him as much as she wanted to fuck him. Maybe she wanted to kill him more than she wanted to fuck him.

  He figured she’d picked him up because she thought he’d lead her to Jolie.

  Remember the hunt cam stunt.

  Why did she do that? To let him know she was looking for Jolie Burke, or let him know she knew where Jolie was?

  Or maybe she was just a lunatic.

  Generally speaking, most people who rose through the ranks to be FBI agents weren’t lunatics. But Carla Vitelli certainly brought the average down.

  Earlier today, the punch-clown prison guard had come to check on them. Landry could tell from the man’s expression that he’d been expecting something other than what he’d seen. What he’d seen was Earl lying on the floor, bloody and unconscious. Landry got the feeling the punch-clown prison guard had planned to call for paramedics. It was just that he’d called the paramedics for the wrong person.

  The shock on the guard’s face, though: priceless.

  After the paramedics came and removed Earl from the cell, after the punch-clown prison guard asked if Landry knew what had happened (Landry said he had no idea; he’d slept right through it), he was left alone. He thought at the time that the prison guard was afraid of him, that he would get reinforcements, but none came. And so he lay on the bunk, doing math problems in his head. He let his mind wander to see if there was some place he had not looked for Jolie.

  He knew that soon he would have another prison mate.

  So he waited, and saved his strength.

  He would be ready when they tried again.

  But it turned out, they didn’t.

  Three hours later another guard showed up, consulted his clipboard, and said, “Chris Keeley?”

  Landry hopped down from his bunk and walked to the cage door. “Do I have a lawyer yet? I asked for one yesterday.”

  “You don’t need a lawyer,” the guard said. He opened up the door and stood back. Landry walked out. His legs felt a little shaky, and he didn’t know why.

  Maybe it was the aftereffects of sleeping with Carla Vitelli.

  The guard handed him over to a sheriff’s deputy, who took him out a loading dock ramp into the blinding sunlight and ordered him to get into the back of a sheriff’s unit. He pushed Landry’s head downward as he climbed in. SOP.

  “Where are we going?” Landry asked when they were rolling.

  “You’ll see.”

  They didn’t go far. The sheriff’s office was across the large parking lot from the jail.

  “You going to try anything?” the guard said.

  “No.”

  “When we get inside, I’ll see if I can get the handcuffs off you.”

  Inside, the air conditioning smacked him in the face. The sheriff’s office was a showplace, different from your average city building—especially in a city this small. For one thing, it was five stories tall. In the foyer, one wall was all glass and looked out on a fountain. It had a modern industrial look that you see in glossy magazines, lots of browns and tans in the palette, walls of mottled granite, metal tarnished an artful coppery-gold. They took the elevator up to the fifth floor, which was all one big suite: the sheriff’s office. Landry had been in governors’ offices a few times in his life, but this office put anything he’d seen to shame. Including one wall dedicated to an aquarium.

  Sheriff Ronald Waldrup sat at a massive desk in front of a polished black granite wall with the “Tobosa County, New Mexico” seal emblazoned upon it. Waldrup’s desk was flanked by a New Mexico state flag on one side and a United States flag on the other. On the desk was a small microphone, the kind that city council members used in their chambers.

  The whole effect seemed counterproductive—the stage
set dwarfed the man.

  The sheriff studied Landry. Landry thought of a little kid sitting at his father’s desk. That was, if the kid was wizened and resembled a stoop-shouldered monkey.

  “So, are you the one-man crime wave people say you are? Mr. er . . .” He looked down through his reading glasses. “Keeley?”

  “I haven’t committed any crime.”

  Waldrup assessed Landry. He pulled off his large glasses and rubbed them with a cloth. “We have reason to suspect you in the disappearance of one of our detectives.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “Detective Burke. Jolie Burke.”

  “Can’t say the name rings a bell.”

  “Is that so?” The sheriff leaned to the side and consulted with the deputy in a low whisper. Ending with, “Is she here?”

  “Yes sir, she’s waiting in the anteroom.”

  “Show her in.”

  Landry knew who it would be.

  Carla Vitelli entered. She wore a dark blue suit that flattered every curve. Her hair was pulled back into an economical bun. She held a folder at her side. She stopped beside the desk and set it down before the sheriff, then stood beside the desk with her hands folded in front of her, eyes on Landry.

  Sheriff Waldrup dipped his head toward the tiny microphone, which Landry suspected doubled as a recording device.

  “Go ahead, Agent Vitelli.”

  She cleared her throat and gave them a summary of Cyril Landry’s crime. He had set up a hunt cam on Jolie Burke’s property after she had gone missing.

  “And what does this signify?” The sheriff spoke into his microphone. “What is your conclusion?”

  “My conclusion is that he was stalking Detective Burke.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Landry said.

  “Probable cause,” said Sheriff Waldrup. “If you indeed set up a camera to watch Detective Burke, it appears evident that you were stalking her.” He leaned forward a little more. “How did you come to cross paths with Detective Burke?”

  “I met her at a conference,” Landry said.

  “What kind of conference?”

  “Comic books.”

  “Comic books?”

  “Yes.”

  Vitelli stared daggers at him. “He’s lying,” she said.

  “You don’t have enough evidence to charge me, so why don’t we just go our separate ways?”

  “You seem to be a transient.”

  “No, I’m just passing through.”

  “You set up those cameras.”

  “I’m sure somebody did. But it wasn’t me.”

  “He’s lying,” Agent Vitelli said.

  “I have been told I have an unmemorable face. I get mistaken for other people all the time.”

  Sheriff Waldrup covered the microphone with his hand and said something to Vitelli, who knitted her brow and looked stony. Landry guessed he was asking her if she had seen Landry setting up the hunt cam.

  Waldrup nodded to the deputy. “He can go. Process him out.”

  The deputy nodded.

  “I hope you’ll at least validate my parking,” Landry said.

  Vitelli glared at him, but said nothing.

  “It’s a shame,” Landry said to Carla as he was walked to the door. “We could have been something.”

  The guard took him back to the intake desk at the jail. Only it must have been the output desk, still inside the inner shell of the jail.

  A man sat at the desk. He looked fastidious—the only person in the place who looked that way. His hair was combed neatly to the side. He had a neatly trimmed beard. He was youngish, and wore stylish clothes—at least for a jail—and wire-rimmed glasses. “Mr. Keeley?” he said, looking up from an open folder on his desk. “Chris, correct?”

  “That’s my name.”

  “You probably know this by now, but we have decided not to extend your stay.”

  “Good, because there was too much chlorine in the spa.”

  The man laughed. It was a tiny laugh, mirthless. “Very funny.”

  “Can you tell me again why I was held?”

  The man twiddled a pen in his fingers. “It says here . . . vagrancy. But it turns out that someone made a mistake—not one of ours, of course. I’m terribly sorry for your inconvenience.”

  “So I’m free to go.”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s Earl?”

  “Earl?”

  “The guy I bunked with.”

  “He had a bad reaction, I heard. Had to go to the hospital. . . . Why?”

  “No reason. So I’m free to go?”

  “Absolutely.” He pushed Landry’s folded clothes and shoes across the desk toward him. “There is a restroom down the hall.” He gestured in the direction with his chin.

  “So this was a mistake.”

  “Yes. A mistake. I’m terribly, terribly sorry.”

  Landry thought that the person who was truly sorry was Carla Vitelli.

  Chapter 9

  By the time Landry got back to the motel, it was going on three in the afternoon.

  Someone had targeted him for death. As if whoever had jailed him went under the theory that Landry posed some kind of threat and should be eliminated, and that person had acted on that theory.

  But it hadn’t panned out, so they let him go. Whoever wanted him dead had to have his hooks deep into the sheriff’s office, or at least the county jail.

  He cut diagonally across the empty lot toward his room. It might be wise to move to another motel; leave the white car there and take the blue van. He needed to clean up first.

  As he took the steps up to the second story, he glanced back at the white rental Nissan, still parked in the same place, nose to nose with a car in the next row. It was in the same place he’d left it. He approached the room from the back and from the right. The shades were drawn. He’d left the TV on to fool people into thinking he was still inside.

  The room was clear, as he’d expected.

  They—the sheriff’s department—knew where he was. They had searched his room, but he knew they had found nothing—everything but a change of clothes and a few traveler’s basics had been left in a storage unit two blocks over.

  Probable cause these days, in certain towns, in certain counties, in certain states, in certain regions, could be stretched beyond recognition. Stretched, wrung out, hung on the line, ironed, folded, spindled, and hung up in a closet. If they’d been playing by the rule of law, they would have had no probable cause to arrest him. And they certainly had no basis to let him go, after he dispatched Earl.

  Police in this town were a law unto themselves.

  He wondered how Jolie had fit into this brave new world in Tobosa County.

  The police had become paramilitary. Police and sheriff’s departments across the country were getting more and more hardware that they didn’t know what to do with. They had everything they needed to fight a ground war. Army surplus was king. SWAT gear, tactical vests, armor-plated vehicles called MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles), tear gas, M-14s, grenade launchers.

  Considering the fact that municipalities liked to get their money’s worth, he was lucky to be alive at all.

  He checked the door for anything unusual. Saw nothing that would raise the alarm. Peered in through the tiny gap in the drapes. Unlocked the door, stood at the side, and kicked it open.

  Nothing.

  He made a quick search of the room. No one hiding in the shower stall, no one in the closet. No bogeyman under the bed. He checked for bugs, too—was quite thorough about it. Stood on the bed and unscrewed the light fixture. Nothing he could see stood out.

  It was good to luxuriate under a hot shower.

  It was going on five p.m. when he changed into the blue work shirt, jeans, and work boots, drove
the blue van to Jolie’s neighborhood, and parked it out front.

  He waited for Jolie’s fellow detective to come by. It didn’t take long. The woman drove up in a late-model car, on the inexpensive side but immaculate. She parked in the driveway and followed the stepping-stones to the front door, unlocked the iron door and the inner door, and went inside.

  He looked around. No one was out and about. Going on dusk. The blinds to the house were closed.

  Then he walked to the door and rang the bell.

  She opened the front door but left the iron door locked. Peered out at him, her face betraying nothing.

  “Is Jolie here?” he asked. “She said to come by and we’d settle up.” He motioned to his truck with the landscaping logo on the side.

  The detective was no pushover. “You’ll have to come back later. Jolie’s out at the moment.”

  Landry let his disappointment show. “Do you know when she’ll be back? I have a job in Deming tomorrow that’s gonna take several days, and to be honest . . .” He slouched a little, swiveled to glance at his van. “I usually get paid up front—she’s really good about that—and I kind of need the money.”

  She wasn’t buying it. “Tell you what,” she said. “If you give me your number, I can have her call you.”

  “That would be great.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a burner phone, and texted her the number. No more tearing off slips of paper to scrawl on, or asking her to go pull off a sheet from the pad by the phone. No muss, no fuss. She looked down at her own phone, then slipped it into the pocket of her jeans—

  And started to close the door. Landry said, “If you talk to her, tell her Cyril came by.”

  “Who?”

  “Cyril. She’ll know.”

  “Cyril. Like the saint? Saint Cyril?”

  “That’s the one.”

  He waited on the street parallel to Jolie’s. Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty. A few minutes after that he saw the headlights of the detective’s car pulling onto the road. He stayed at least two lights behind—there were three traffic lights before she turned into a newer neighborhood. The streets were quiet, with tall palm trees and pueblo-style condominiums, most of them pale yellow. Brown poles stuck out of the top of the stucco near the roofline like the pegs on Frankenstein’s forehead. Typical New Mexico fare. Landry stayed way back and out of sight with the van, training binocs on her. She pulled into a condominium’s driveway, the automatic garage door opened, and she drove inside. The garage door rattled back down.